John Dewey came to Chicago in 1894 with his wife, Alice Dewey, to start a school in order to test his theories of learning.
He believed that learning was active and that children came to school to do things; that learning arithmetic would come from learning proportions in cooking or figuring out how long it would take to get from one place to another by mule. History, how people lived, geography, what the climate was like, and how plants and animals grew, were important subjects.
Dewey's gift was for suggesting activities that captured the center of what his classes
were studying. He believed, together with University of Chicago President William Rainey
Harper, that schooling was unnecessarily long.
Archive: photo #001
John Dewey - 1890's - exact year unknown.
Click on the photo for a larger size.
